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You can talk toughness, demand toughness, even flaunt toughness and still your boss can consider your fate and decide, well, tough.

So it was in 2009, when Jim Mora was coaching the Seattle Seahawks and lost his composure – and perhaps his marbles – while ripping his offensive linemen.

He used words like “nastiness,” “frickin’ toughness” and “nail-eater,” suggesting the group was soft and lacked an essential quality he termed “dirtbag.”

Mora boldfaced the observations first by pounding his fist on a table and then threatening his players with their job security.

“Everyone knows,” reminded Mora, who, nearing the end of his first season as head coach, was empowered by the three years remaining on his contract, “that they are being evaluated.”

Three games later, Mora was fired.

Toughness can be a tricky thing, even today, with Mora now 24 games into his tenure at UCLA but still fighting to remove a perception that clings to his Bruins like a tattoo.

Upon his arrival, this program was viewed as being as soft as the powder-blue hue of the team’s uniforms. The harshest critics portrayed the players as plush stuffed animals, like products from a place called Build-A-Bruin or something.

Mora was brought in to forge toughness. He hired an NFL strength and conditioning coach with a reputation of fire and commitment, commitment so strong that Sal Alosi, once while standing on the sidelines, stuck out his knee and tripped an opposing player running down to cover a punt.

In preparation for his first season, Mora shipped the Bruins in August to San Bernardino to train in triple-digit heat and double-figure intensity, the move resulting in comparisons to Bear Bryant and a time when football had a genuine militaristic edge.

Mora’s first UCLA team was good enough, hard enough to reach the Pac-12 title game. But, once there, the Bruins lost for the second time in a week to Stanford. They then traveled to the Holiday Bowl, where they were pummeled by an unranked Baylor team built on offense and finesse.

This season, Mora’s team is in a similar position, again controlling its Pac-12 championship game fate and entering a Saturday meeting with Arizona State coming off gritty victories over Arizona and Washington.

And yet, toughness – perceived and real – remains tricky, that tattoo looking more permanent, like a birthmark.

Consider all this evidence: UCLA is ranked eight spots ahead of ASU in the USA Today poll, five spots ahead in the Associated Press poll and three spots ahead in the BCS standings. Both teams are 8-2, though the Sun Devils lead the Bruins by a game in the Pac-12 South.

UCLA has lost at Stanford and at Oregon, the top two teams in the conference. Arizona State has lost at Stanford and against an underwhelming Notre Dame team in a game played in Texas.

UCLA is the home team Saturday.

And still … the Bruins are underdogs! The Sun Devils are favored by 21/2 points and not because Arizona State football has a long-standing tradition of going on the road and winning huge games in November.

If Arizona State football has a tradition of anything in November, it’s playing for the head coach’s job or a spot in the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl.

The 2 1/2-point spread doesn’t just indicate which team the oddsmakers think will win. Oh, no, it’s even more telling than that.

Each line is designed to attract an equal amount of betting action on both sides. In other words, the oddsmakers knew they had to establish the Bruins as underdogs by enough points to match how the public perceives this game will go.

In even more other words, the general feeling out there remains that UCLA football isn’t tough enough to win a late-season matchup against a comparable opponent ranked behind the Bruins, even when the game is at the Rose Bowl.

If there’s a more obvious indication of how unconvinced people remain of this team and its head coach, we’re not aware of it.

All of this comes after a weekend in which the Bruins beat a good Washington team and fell backward in the rankings anyway. UCLA was leap-frogged by Michigan State, which plays in the Big Ten, a conference that has spent much of this season losing to Northern Illinois and being mocked nationally.

“They continue to show grit and resilience and toughness and all those things that make a special football team,” Mora said of his players after the victory over the Huskies. He said those words, all right, though it would be difficult to prove anyone heard him.

So the pursuit of toughness continues, along with, quite obviously, the search for respect. A victory Saturday would strengthen the Bruins’ case, no doubt, but change – true change – that’s tricky, too.

That will be clear next week, when UCLA plays USC, a team that was once a wounded animal but now is a pack of angry overdogs.

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